A decade after hiring Ellen Pao as his technical chief of staff, prominent venture capitalist John Doerr faced her in court Tuesday, defending Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers against Pao’s claims of sex discrimination and retaliation.

In more than five hours of testimony, Doerr retraced Pao’s trajectory through Kleiner Perkins, from a staffer who described herself as his “surrogate daughter,” to a disgruntled junior partner who felt she was repeatedly snubbed for promotions and choice assignments. Doerr’s testimony continued Tuesday afternoon. Read More »

Speaking at a technology conference hosted by Morgan Stanley, Noto said the company has seen an “uptick” in the number of users that have used direct messages and the number of overall messages being sent in the private chat forums since Twitter launched group chats in December. He did not provide specific numbers. Read More »

In another small victory for service workers in Silicon Valley, Apple said it will hire full-time security guards, with benefits, rather than rely on an outside contractor.

“We will be hiring a large number of full-time people to handle our day-to day security needs,” Apple said in a statement. It said it hopes most of the positions will be filled by employees from its existing contractor, Security Industry Specialists, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Read More »

Huawei Technologies Co. Chief Executive Ken Hu says his company’s current foray into smart bracelets and connected watches is just the beginning of a broader trend that will see those ubiquitous black slabs in users’ pockets slowly turn into an array of wearable objects and virtual-reality devices. Read More »

Some banks are seeing a growing incidence of fraud on Apple’s mobile-payment service as criminals exploit vulnerabilities in the verification process of adding a credit card, according to people familiar with the matter.

Banks are tightening the verification process in an attempt to curb the fraud, these people said, declining to be identified citing a confidentiality agreement with Apple. Read More »

It had early traction, blue-ribbon backers and hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. Instead, Fab stands as a cautionary tale for the latest generation of high-flying Internet startups. Read More »

In January 2014, ToutApp Inc. Chief Executive Tawheed Kader faced a tough decision for his software startup, which at the time had seven employees: accept an offer worth millions of dollars from a large marketing-automation company and get acquired, or continue to go it alone.

Mr. Kader raised money for ToutApp instead, and now after a year of rapid growth in which ToutApp’s revenue grew by 300% and its number of customers doubled, he’s raised money again, a $15 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, taking total funding in the company to more than $20 million. Read More »

Sergio Marchionne says he’s taking the car ambitions of Apple seriously. But the chief executive of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles sounds less than entirely comfortable at the prospect of the technology giant devoting some of its nearly $178 billion in cash to breaking into the car industry. Read More »